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Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be con­tex­tu­al­ized.

At the time when he lived in 500BC, [Confucius] was the epit­o­me of good gov­er­nance. He was the epit­o­me of pro­gres­sive ways towards a peace­ful and just order. And he pio­neered many things that we would regard today still as extreme­ly impor­tant.

Everybody thinks of bureau­crats as being kind of a neu­tral force. But I’m going to make the case that bureau­crats are in fact a very strong­ly neg­a­tive force, and that automat­ing the bureau­crat­ic func­tions inside of our soci­ety is nec­es­sary for fur­ther human progress.

Increasingly we’re using auto­mat­ed tech­nol­o­gy in ways that kind of sup­port humans in what they’re doing rather than just hav­ing algo­rithms work on their own, because they’re not smart enough to do that yet or deal with unex­pect­ed sit­u­a­tions.

I teach my stu­dents that design is ongo­ing risky decision-making. And what I mean by ongo­ing is that you nev­er real­ly get to stop ques­tion­ing the assump­tions that you’re mak­ing and that are under­ly­ing what it is that you’re creating—those fun­da­men­tal premis­es.

One of the chal­lenges of build­ing new tech­nolo­gies is that we often want them to solve things that have been very social­ly dif­fi­cult to solve. Things that we don’t have answers to, prob­lems that we don’t know how we would best go about it in a social­ly respon­si­ble way.

Machine learn­ing sys­tems that we have today have become so pow­er­ful and are being intro­duced into every­thing from self-driving cars, to pre­dic­tive polic­ing, to assist­ing judges, to pro­duc­ing your news feed on Facebook on what you ought to see. And they have a lot of soci­etal impacts. But they’re very dif­fi­cult to audit.